I've been saying this forever!! When I was a teen in the 90s, I got new music from the radio. The music director picked 40ish songs a week and that's what we listened to. I still like to listen to the radio for the curation.
I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.
But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
I think kids nowadays likely still have a shared cultural experience like we did when we were young. We're just, separated from that experience. Just like our parents were when we were young.
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
Gianmarco Soresi discussed this on an episode of his podcast.
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.
The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.
This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
When we were kids, just knowing music that wasn't on the radio made you "into music". Things were very different! The internet has really allowed music choices to be much more personal and I think it's a good thing. We have such a wide variety of music available to us now.
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
Jerry Pournelle wrote about this, I think I recall reading in USENET; how with the burgeoning availability of media, the role of the editor, the curator, would become critical.
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
I am confused. Spotify and Netflix both have recommendation engines that include a wide variety of factors, including popularity with other users and "closeness" to your favourite musical styles. I assume these are AI/ML models of some sort. Essentially, these automated engines have replaced the music director from 1990s radio stations.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
> Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
Interesting you mentioned movies because I think movies are resurgent now where it seems like everyone is seeing all the new releases. I can hardly book imax anymore because they book up a month in advance and are booked up a month out and then they pull it from the imax theater to make room for the next thing to be fully booked out a month out. There is serious demand it seems to keep up with the latest movies especially when it is offered in higher fidelity like imax and 70mm releases.
Disagree. Eberyone is on the same websites, seeing the same memes, listening to the same music. Its just not from a radio. The curation process happens via social media consumption where the most popular sthff floats to the top. There is absolutely still a shared cultural experience, youre just not hip to it.
"Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did."
I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...
There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.
In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.
All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)
It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
> But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
When I was younger I had a few different sources for finding music - a couple of friends who were really into music and I knew they were investing time and searching for it, so I always wanted to hear what they recommend, even if it didn’t match my taste. There was also a curated website and a forum dedicated to alternative genres, like hardcore or post rock and other “edgy” stuff, where I liked to hang out. I knew this is where people really passionate about music gathered and it was interesting to see what they like and what they recommend. It was always driven my community, by people I liked or loved, or trusted their judgement.
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
Seems there are two things going on here that is being conflated.
1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much.
2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago?
[EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.
However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web.
I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.
I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)
I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
> It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
> It felt like the first 3 (or 2.5) paragraphs, which were arguing that Bjork needed an official website, were a bit of a tangent from the main argument of the article, which was that we need more professional critics, but social media has essentially defunded and dethroned them.
In what way is that a tangent? In both cases, the author argues that a centralized authoritative source of information is better than scattershot posts on social media.
I feel like this is one of the big reasons I find myself coming back to hackernews recently. The content I see is THE SAME content everyone sees. As a collective there is a consensus around what is happening in the community however small.
I don't really disagree with the idea that there's value in curation. And I even think there's some value in gatekeeping. Sometimes, at least.
But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators.
Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day.
But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck.
One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
Curation is the uncrossable moat for AGI/ASI as an inherently human-to-human behavior.
Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.
It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
Just thought about this in the context of searching for products.
Nowadays there is so much stuff and also so much information available, one just gets lost in this huge sea and spends countless hours trying to find the “best” product… back in the days you would have only one or two choices and that would be it. But was it better? Im actually not so sure…
I think it goes far deeper than curation, it's that all tooling that encourages self determination and discovery has been stripped out of UIs.
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
Corollary: If everything is curated, how do we find helpful curation?
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
We have tools today that are uniquely good at wading through disparate sources and aggregating things into a format that we can easily digest. The worry of course - is that these tools are generally on offer from huge tech giants (google, openai, etc). The good news is, we have open-source versions of these tools that perform almost as well as the closed-source versions for these types of categorization and aggregation.
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
I do sort of think Pandora feels like better algorithmic song finding—maybe it is just that I have an old profile so it has learned enough about me to do good matching, though.
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
I used Pandora from inception, but swapped to Spotify because the algo stopped working completely for me, and they ran into licensing issues with a lot of content and a lot of the oddball music I was listening to or used as a seed for stations just vanished completely.
I agree with the sentiment completely. From link directories to search engines, and now with AI, and from reblogging to recommendation algorithms, I think what is being lost is the ability to "browse" the web. To look at a list of things that may not interest you. Because sometimes among those things you do find something that piques your interest.
> I discovered interesting music like Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Portishead, Tricky, Orbital, Takako Minekawa, Hooverphonic, Poe, Veruca Salt all from sporadically listening to one college radio station in my hometown and, once a week, watching one music program on MTV (usually 120 Minutes or AMP). Then, once a month, I would sometimes flip through a music magazine while at the hair salon (usually Rolling Stone or Spin). And that was literally it.
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
I miss Entertainment Weekly having a print subscription. I loved tearing out blurbs about stuff that was coming out and sticking them to my pin board. Feels more real than adding something to a watchlist (which I NEVER look at) in an app.
What most people refer to as "culture" or "art" are products that are vectors for identity in a fractured society. If the author feels malaise over not being able to find to find new things to watch and listen to, imagine how hard it must be to just be yourself these days and foster communities around the likes and dislikes that you share with other people. Curating/taste-making is identity politics.
Not entirely related, but back in the 80s we "found" PC games by getting a 5 inch diskette from my father's colleagues, with the bonuses of getting computer viruses at the same time.
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
I still do listen to the radio to discover new music, not live shows though but catch-up episodes. It's definitely worth it, yes some of the songs might not be to my taste but at least you get the chance to make that determination yourself and you get exposed to different stuff.
In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.
I had similar feeling over the past few years, trying futilely to escape the algorithm.. I recently discovered radiop aradise[1] which is exactly what I needed - free, old style, very little talk, human-curated radio. They have a vast selection of titles, and they simply play good music - stuff I know, stuff I don't.. it's just great.
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
[+] [-] jedberg|10 months ago|reply
I even wrote a program to scrape the websites of my favorite radio stations (well the stations of my favorite music directors) and add the songs to a Spotify playlist.
Whenever I meet a teenager today, one of the first things I ask them is "what apps do you use most", but the next thing I ask is "how do you find new music".
The answer is usually something like "I don't know, I just sort of find stuff I guess?". Some have said they follow influencer's playlists on YouTube or Spotify, which I guess is the new version of the music director? Or they just get it from Spotify playlists.
But what's missing is a shared cultural experience. In the 90s, everyone at my school knew those 40 songs that the local stations played. They might know other stuff too, but you couldn't avoid those top songs. It's not the same today. And it's the same problem for visual media. We all knew the top movies at the theater, because it was the only place to see new movies. And we all knew the top TV shows because they were only on four major networks.
Kids don't have a shared cultural experience like I did.
[+] [-] curun1r|10 months ago|reply
This is my problem with the proliferation of streaming platforms when it comes to movies and TV. We’ve arguably got more and better content than we’ve ever had. But I find myself far less motivated to watch it. I used to watch content anticipating the conversations I’d have with friends and colleagues. Now, whenever we try to talk about it, it’s 30 seconds of, “Have you seen …?” “No, have you seen …?” “No.” Until we give up and talk about something else.
It’s made me realize that the sharing it with others part was always my favorite part of listening/watching and, without that, I can’t really become emotionally invested it the experience.
[+] [-] crm9125|10 months ago|reply
Maybe they can't (or don't want to, out of fear of being embarrassed or feeling uncool/uncertain perhaps) explain to you how they find things, but when they are hanging out with their friends and are talking about similar interests, discovering they know about similar things, and sharing things they know about that their friends don't yet/learning similar things from their friends, that's where the magic happens.
[+] [-] Cheetah26|10 months ago|reply
He says how there used to be a number of nationally known comedians who could make jokes that appealed to everyone's shared cultural experience, but now that's effectively impossible because a) culture isn't tied to geography / location, and b) niches are much more prevalent. I loved the example that huge venues can now often be sold out for artists you've never heard of.
On one hand it's not neccessarily a bad thing since individuals are getting more of what truly appeals to them, but I also think that the result could be increasing the barrier to connect with others because it decreases the chances that you'll have interests in common.
[+] [-] baxtr|10 months ago|reply
I feel like social media trough its amplification has lead to a global sync in topics and experiences.
I’d argue a kid growing up India or China shares much more culturally today with a western Kid than 30 years ago.
Take the news for example. Last weeks it was tariffs. The entire world was talking about the same thing.
To the contrary I feel like we are living more and more in the same global reality going from one headline to the next every week.
[+] [-] bflesch|10 months ago|reply
You observe correctly but the conclusion is incorrect. You fail to take into account that year-, location- and interest-based cohorts of kids tend to follow the same influencers, and thereby consume the same content.
The problem for outside observers is that without the platform's data we cannot identify the cohorts and thereby cannot distinguish between the groups.
This logic follows a set-based approach to social media analytics called social set analysis pioneered by a research group at which I later did my PhD.
[+] [-] chrismorgan|10 months ago|reply
A hundred years ago, everyone used the King James Version of the Bible.¹ Poorly though it reflected the common language², it was a shared experience, and things like memorisation and making and recognising scriptural allusions were straightforward, because everyone used the same words. Now, a wide variety of Bible translations are in common use, some more accurate than the KJV, some more loose paraphrases, all more understandable. There are some big advantages in this variety and modernity—but we have lost something. The shared experience had a virtue of its own, quite a significant one.
—⁂—
¹ OK, by a hundred years ago the RV and ASV were used in some areas, but it was mostly as a distant extra to the KJV, not replacing it.
² I understand that some of it was already becoming archaic, or at least overly formal, when it was published, such as thee/thou (singular you). The fact is, it was “appointed to be read in Churches”, and they wanted it to sound impressive. Compare it with Tyndale’s translation almost a hundred years earlier, and Tyndale’s generally reads much more easily—because Tyndale wanted uneducated people to be able to understand the Bible.³
³ “And sone after Maister Tyndall happened to be in the companie of a learned man, and in communing and disputing with him, drove him to that issue that the learned manne sayde, we were better be without Gods lawe, then the Popes: Maister Tyndall hearing that, answered hym, I defie the Pope and all his lawes, and sayde, if God spare my lyfe ere many yeares, I wyl cause a boye that dryveth the plough, shall knowe more of the scripture then thou doest.” — John Foxe, Actes and Monuments (1563), page 570.
[+] [-] withzombies|10 months ago|reply
I've had some luck finding some TikTok creators who curate specific "vibes" and publish Spotify playlists. I think that's just how it's done now.
[+] [-] perching_aix|10 months ago|reply
Of course they do. The music director is now the recommendation algorithm of each platform (as mentioned), and so what you'll find is that like-minded people have very similar recommendations in their feeds. There are also meta profiles on these platforms who instead of making their own content, "curate" and reshare content within (or from out of) the platform. And what disparities do arise, people undo them organically by sharing content with each other in different channels anyways. This is how things go "viral".
It's actually kind of scary how people can convince themselves into ideas like yours here. One would think you live in a different world or something. This is the same world where memes and viral social media posts are everyday news topics. It's where blockbuster movies and TV shows continue to exist, where GTA6's release will cause a billion dollar revenue loss to the economy in lost workhours, and so on.
[+] [-] rout39574|10 months ago|reply
He thought well and deeply about the challenges of the growing net.
[+] [-] verisimi|10 months ago|reply
I tend to think that humans historically have had very isolated, independent experiences. It is only recently with mass media that we all share a collective experience.
I take your point that kids today are not having a shared one-directional (tv to person) experience. However, they are sharing apps, with that data being intermediated. It is uni-directional too, so more immersive.
I tend to see technology, and the direction of travel, as highly collectivising rather less of a shared cultural experience. Everyone is endlessly exposed to exciting ideas and content that are not self-generated.
So, collectivised thinking UP, independent thinking DOWN.
[+] [-] ta12653421|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] sailorganymede|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] throwaway2037|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tonyhart7|10 months ago|reply
they did, they just have different algos for that. I found italian brainrot meme and what surprising it was so popular for kids, like tens of millions of views
seems like Trends are more personalize now, what popular song that adult like is different with younger audience like
its like having different Trends that live on bubble
[+] [-] lordnacho|10 months ago|reply
Heh, I told my kid this today on the way to dropping him off with a friend. We were listening to The Rest is History, about the Rolling Stones. They made the point that this common cultural experience started to become a thing roughly in the 60s.
When I was a kid, there were things that you just could not avoid. It was the same in many places: there was a national broadcaster, and maybe a second and third TV station. There were only so many things you could watch. Whatever TV series, music, or sports were on, you could be sure everyone else was also watching it.
It started changing in the 1990s where I grew up, completely changing from the start to the end. You got a bunch of channels. You could watch news from America and other places, which maybe deserves a footnote about immigrants being able to watch something from faraway for the first time. More options everywhere, but there was still momentum. You still watched the national news on the main stations, and sports was still there too. They also tended to curate the "best" foreign shows, so you didn't have to wait to get your dose of America.
Now that's finished. Everything is private now, you can watch whatever you want on your own screen (TVs got really cheap. When I was a kid, people would congratulate you when you bought a new one, like it was a car. Now I have more TVs than I can use.) You don't have to watch things at the scheduled time anymore, and you don't have to arrange your life around when the episodes come out.
The kids now watch a wider variety of content. There's still "local" fads that are maybe restricted to friendship groups, instead of being national phenomena. For instance my kid and his friends ended up watching One Piece, a Japanese production. But I never ran into other kids who were into it.
I also dare to say that the kids now watch lower quality content. This was already a thing when we got flooded with channels in the 1990s. There was a heck of a lot of mediocre crap on those 100 extra channels. But now it's a whole new world of terrible. Yes, I'm an old man. But it does seem like having curation would mostly bubble the good things to the top, and so when the curation went away, you got more stuff, but worse stuff. Similar to consumer products, the items at your department store tended to be reasonable, but when there's a webshop where you can buy anything at all, you have to sort through a pile of low quality stuff yourself.
[+] [-] squigz|10 months ago|reply
I suppose you didn't have the same cultural experience as your parents. That's how culture works - it changes over time.
[+] [-] kjkjadksj|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] TiredOfLife|10 months ago|reply
Schools don't have bullies?
That's the extent of my shared cultural experience as a kid.
[+] [-] DontchaKnowit|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] acomjean|10 months ago|reply
I do check out mit radios list from time to time. It’s somewhat useful to know the names of the shows that play music you like..
https://track-blaster.com/wmbr/
[+] [-] b0ner_t0ner|10 months ago|reply
Those Top 40 singles were spoon-fed to you by Clear Channel within a very limited selection from the Top 5 major record labels.
[+] [-] jzb|10 months ago|reply
I think this is two claims -- AFAICT kids do have a shared cultural experience, but it is true it's not like yours, or mine. The Spotify playlists are one way they find new music, TikTok being another, movies/TV shows, or word of mouth.
What some folks may have found useful about radio playing gatekeeper and music directors choosing 40 songs per week (they didn't) others of us found stifling.
I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a small town on outskirts of St. Louis. We could get a few classic rock/AOR stations (KSHE, KSD) and starting in the early 80s there was "hit radio" KHTR which almost quite literally followed the 40 songs per week model...
There's tons of music I didn't* discover in the early 80s, such as The Smiths, that I only happened on later because of strong gatekeeping via radio.
In the 90s we got KPNT ("the point") which was alternative rock and more adventurous than KHTR, and by then I also had a car and access to the good record stores in St. Louis. I amassed a large CD collection and stopped listening to the radio almost entirely excepting some college radio, and kept up with new music via Rolling Stone, Spin, etc. Even bought some albums based entirely on their reviews without having heard them at all.
All of that long and rambly comment to say... I like music discovery today far more than I did in my youth, 20s, and early 30s. I skim Bandcamp regularly for new music, watch questions about music on Ask Metafilter, and have found YouTube Music's algorithm to be decent. (e.g., pick a song, make it a "radio" station and add songs I haven't heard before but like to my library.)
It is true that I rarely find folks to discuss music with because I am not listening to mainstream music much. That part sucks -- but few people my age seem to care about music deeply.
* Almost certainly the music director for your local station was subscribed to a service that provided a weekly list of songs to program, rather than choosing them themselves. I worked part-time in radio while in college, taking weekend and evening/midnight-6 a.m. shifts, in Washington MO and Kirksville MO. KSLQ (adult contemporary), KRXL (classic rock/AOR), KTUF (country) and KIRX (talk, sports) were all largely getting program direction from national syndicated programming. The local music director might have used some discretion in choosing / filtering out some songs, but they were likely getting the direction from a service.
[+] [-] iNic|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] rsynnott|10 months ago|reply
I mean, there's certainly greater diversity (particularly for music, stuff outside of the mainstream always existed, of course, but the barrier to entry was far higher then than now), but there's still a large shared _core_ of content.
[+] [-] unknown|10 months ago|reply
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[+] [-] kilroy123|10 months ago|reply
No fancy algorithm or AI tool will replace human curation with good tastes (or what you think is good taste)
I dig this for music curation: https://ghostly.com/
If anyone has other similar links I'd love to see them.
[+] [-] romankolpak|10 months ago|reply
Needless to say you get none of that with algorithms. Spotify does recommend some good songs for me regularly and I often add them to “liked” but it’s much lonelier now. Music used to connect me with other people and now it’s just me and my Spotify.
[+] [-] paleotrope|10 months ago|reply
1. The amount of "culture" being created has to be like a magnitude of order greater than 25 years ago. Of course you can't watch all those shows and movies't now. There are too many and it's too much.
2. The algorithms were developed to help with this problem. They are just a poor match for the problem.
[+] [-] lapcat|10 months ago|reply
I'm personally ambivalent about the argument. I'm old enough to have lived in a time before the rise of the web and social media. However, my youthful tastes were much more mainstream than my current tastes. Thus, I never really needed to find obscure content without the web. Nowadays I'm not a big fan of popular culture, but on the other hand my taste doesn't seem to match well with professional critics either. So how do I find stuff? My "process" is very hit-and-miss. I sample a bunch of stuff that sounds interesting to me, and if I don't actually find it interesting, I bail out ASAP. Streaming media sites are good for this kind of scattershot approach. I also go the public library, browse the shelves, and just randomly check out several books that I might like. Perhaps the majority turn out to be duds, but I've found a number of diamonds in the rough that way, books that I never would have read otherwise. (Incidentally, the library also provides access to sites such as https://www.kanopy.com/)
I don't feel the need to stay current on culture. The books, films, and TV shows that I find might be recent, or they might be quite old. There's plenty of good stuff from the past that for whatever reason I never encountered until now. If you're following the professional critics, you'll likely only be learning about new content; it's not that the critics didn't talk about old stuff before, but it's just as difficult to find old critical discussions about old content as it is to find the old content itself. How else but randomly will you find reviews of obscure stuff from 20 years ago?
[EDIT:] Thinking back to my preteen years, the public library was also crucial for me then. I remember discovering influential works such as Frank Herbert's Dune and Plato's Apology there, just browsing the shelves.
[+] [-] microtonal|10 months ago|reply
I was very deep into non-mainstream music when I was in my teenage years (90ies) and magazines and (the little access I had to) the web were not very useful. Even outside the mainstream, a lot of magazines were mostly into the big alternative acts and mostly fed by leads by music companies.
The best way to discover music was to go to small alternative music shops. I would hang there for hours and would listen as many records as the owners tolerated. And since they were music buffs themselves and pretty much knew every obscure record they were selling, they could often point you to interesting records.
I don't think much has changed for my peers, back then they would listen what the top-40, MTV, and TMF would give them, and now they listen what record companies are pushing or astroturfing. (I don't mean this in a denigrating way, there are other media where I am more into mainstream stuff, like TV shows.)
I don't go to record shops anymore, but I still find music based on 'browsing' and word of mouth mostly. The good thing of 2025 is that I can get my hands on every bit of obscure music, whereas in 1995, some albums would have to be imported by a record store and it was way out of my budget as a teen.
[+] [-] gwern|10 months ago|reply
Not so much of a tangent as just the relevant argument not being made clearly. The Bjork example demonstrates the value of a central, canonical source for information in overcoming the costs of friction from direct messaging, which creates a chaotic cacophony of tiny bite-sized messages which are difficult and exhausting to piece together into a final meaningful message, and result in the interested Bjork fans living in their own little information-universes: in one universe, it's a film+documentary, in another, it's a film. So they can't even manage to agree on the most basic facts. (Which has downstream effects: a Bjork fan may not know they have access to the documentary or that they can assume most of the film-watchers saw the documentary and they can invoke it without confusion or spoilers.) The 'advantage' of social media and disintermediation proved to be illusory as they came with too much overhead and destruction of any canon or commons.
[+] [-] wavemode|10 months ago|reply
In what way is that a tangent? In both cases, the author argues that a centralized authoritative source of information is better than scattershot posts on social media.
[+] [-] arguflow|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] chowells|10 months ago|reply
But the timing is really funny here, given the massive success Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is currently experiencing. People have found this game - and it's not by curation. It's by massive word of mouth, as people who try the game tend to tell all their friends about it. In the case where something is really good, people find out about it without curators.
Curators are good for finding some stuff. But the ones so good that everyone talks about? You'll find them anyway.
[+] [-] protocolture|10 months ago|reply
When I first signed on to Netflix it worked me out and suggested a bunch of stuff that I love to this day.
But then it ran out of stuff, or they borked the algorithm and now it sucks. And all its competitors suck.
One thing I have noticed is that if you ask a human for a specific recommendation like "Suggest me a novel like The Martian" if they dont have a specific recommendation, you just get their favourite instead. Which makes reddit threads and similar completely useless. The signal to noise ratio is awful.
[+] [-] Papazsazsa|10 months ago|reply
Trends, tastes, and language evolve in real time, driven by social signaling, novelty bias, and the human instinct for signaling to preserve individuality and status within a group and against the algorithm. One need only rabbit hole down various corners of the internet to see this, but its even more pronounced in personal fashion, indie bookstores and art galleries, and even inside people's homes.
It is immensely gratifying to me because it means humans will always need humans, no matter how hard tech tries.
In trying to financialize, map, or otherwise algorithmically diagnose taste, effort impeaches itself.
[+] [-] tacker2000|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] fellowniusmonk|10 months ago|reply
Every influencer or algo is some one/corp curating content (ultimately for their own profit motive, not for their followes)
The only place to get lost is wikipedia or tvtropes, there is no sense that you can discover things and this is tied to profit motives.
We need open source platforms more than ever, not closed platforms behind logins but with open source codebases, but open platforms, where data is free, where the focus is on having all the data from all the sources and surfacing it in any way a person can imagine.
We used to have tools curators could use, powerful search functionality, there was a sense that with infinite things to do some people wanted the wiki and some people wanted to create articles from the wiki and some people liked the article or the broadcast and didn't care to look at the wiki.
But now we have only curation and all the data itself is hidden behind walled gardens.
So now we look at jpgs posted on instagram to figure out what might be fun to do this weekend and that's just dumb.
We have curation to our specific tastes and we grow less and less tolerant of the shocking and surprising because even when we radically change our views it's because an algorithm has slowly steared us that way, and so nothing is new or surprising and there is no discovery anymore.
[+] [-] WarOnPrivacy|10 months ago|reply
If we fill the void indicated in the article - that is, we post and host useful information, how do we get it noticed by the audience that's looking for it?
As far as we believe we can't rise above the noise, we're unlikely to assemble info and make it available.
[+] [-] monatron|10 months ago|reply
I would agree that information is now more scattered (like bread for ducks as the author notes) than ever before -- but we now have the unprecedented ability to wrangle it ourselves.
[+] [-] bee_rider|10 months ago|reply
But, it is notable for being a pretty old site, from back before the algorithmic feeds really exploded and took control of everything… I often wonder if we actually don’t like algorithmic (non)curation, or if we just don’t like the shitty version of it has developed.
—
What’s the story behind the Bjork thing? I’ve always found celebrities that just sort of stay hidden between releases endearing. I mean isn’t that what the rest of us would do?
Enya, obviously, has it all figured out.
[+] [-] Sleaker|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] AlienRobot|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] bmink|10 months ago|reply
This section contains two types of curation that have to be separated: college radio is good curation, it is nonprofit, done by people for the love of the medium and will help you broaden your horizon. Rolling Stone et. al. is bad curation, a form of gatekeeping really, very commercial, requiring lots of connections and resources to get featured in.
[+] [-] miiiiiike|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] tolerance|10 months ago|reply
[+] [-] ferguess_k|10 months ago|reply
In the 90s I "found" PC games by reading magazines and borrowing a un-labeled CD from a classmate who owns every Japanese gaming consoles from NES to Saturn.
[+] [-] djhworld|10 months ago|reply
In my experience the algorithmic recommendation systems don't do this, I mean they might throw you a wildcard in here or there but I tend to find they overfit on some niche and it just becomes tiresome, and you don't get the commentary from the DJ who might add something like describing who the artist is, what the song's name is and maybe some flavour on the DJs interactions with the artist over time.
[+] [-] yhager|10 months ago|reply
They also have a world music channel, which I couldn't find any parallel anywhere else. They have wonderful music there when I'm in my "world music" mood. All in all, it's a gem, highly recommended for any music lovers who prefer curated over algorithmic.
[1] https://radioparadise.com/home